Spic and Span

Spic and Span

Spic and Span is a major U.S. brand of all-purpose household cleanser, invented by housewives Elizabeth "Bet" MacDonald and Naomi Stenglein in Saginaw, Michigan in 1933. The women experimented until they came up with a formula that included equal parts of ground-up glue, sodium carbonate and trisodium phosphate. Naomi observed that all the testing in her house made her home spotless, or "spick and span". They took the k off spick and started selling the product in brown envelopes to local markets. From 1933 to 1944 both families helped run their "Spic and Span Products Company". On January 29, 1945 Procter & Gamble bought Spic and Span for $1.9 million.

The powdered form must be mixed in water prior to use; a liquid version is also available. The product name is a slangsynonym for "clean". Although considered all-purpose, it is "not recommended for carpets, upholstery, aluminum, glass, laundry or mixing with bleach or ammonia".

In January 2001, Shansby Group, a San Francisco investment firm, purchased the brand from P&G along with the Cinch line of multi-surface cleaning products. GTCR Golder Rauner acquired the brand in 2004, after a reformulation of the Spic and Span product line.

The product took the name from a common phrase meaning extremely clean, "spick and span", which was a British idiom first recorded in 1579, and used shortly afterwards in Samuel Pepys's diary. A spick was a spike or nail, a span was a very fresh wood chip, and thus the phrase meant clean and neat and all in place, as in being nailed down. The "span" in the idiom also is part of "brand span new", now more commonly rendered "brand spanking new", and has nothing to do with the words "Spanish" or "Hispanic".

Nevertheless, in 1999, the Mexican-American organization LatinosUSA organized a boycott against Spic and Span because of the use of the word spic, which is a derogatory term for a person of Latino descent. In addition, the term "spic and span" was used to derogate mixed-race couples of African American and Puerto Rican origin.